Do you need details? I am too weary to note them now, and besides, what difference does it make? Final score: S&S: 5, the Izzie boys: 0.
But I knew: the real hunt was just beginning.
CHAPTER 21
Jean Marquez” was how she answered her phone.
“Jean, it’s Bob Swagger.”
“Oh, you!” she said. “I’m so happy to hear from you. I thought you’d disappeared.”
“I can be hard to find at times. My old crank’s suspicion.”
He was calling from his cell in the arrival terminal at Baltimore/Washington International. Vacation in Baltimore? In the real world, it’s been known to happen, but in this case, he was on duty, as it were. It wasn’t exactly Marquez he wanted to see; nor did he want to rent her inherited tommy gun – yet. He had another purpose.
“I heard about some Russian driver-murderer killed in Dallas,” she said. “I know I can’t ask you questions, but–”
“That was part of the deal. He was the wheel man. He tried his trick on somebody who was waiting for him. It was part of an FBI sting.”
“You–”
“I had a little to do with it. But the job ain’t finished. Have you got time to talk?”
“I’m a newspaper reporter. I chat, that’s what I do. Go ahead.”
“Ah, this is sort of hard to explain, but some evidence has come up that suggests a puzzle of some sort, many years old, might be involved and has to be solved. I know, it sounds goofy. It is goofy. But that’s how they worked back then.”
“I’m listening.”
“Did your husband ever make a connection to the Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov?”
“I must say, the last two words I ever expected to come from your mouth are ‘Vladimir’ and ‘Nabokov.’”
“They were the last two words I ever expected to say, believe me.”
“The answer would be no. Jimmy’s literary period was long past. He read about guns and he read history and politics. I don’t think I ever saw him read a novel.”
“Long shot here: did he ever show any interest in a gun called a Red Nine, an old German automatic pistol?”
“You know, it was always one gun or another, but they didn’t stick in my mind. I could check his books, I suppose. He was forever buying gun books from Amazon. The one-click shopping was his financial ruin.”
“That would be a help. I have one other question. This one is strange. It’s so strange, I can’t believe I’m asking it.”
“Wow, I can’t wait,” she said.
“It’s about literature.”
“Not exactly a small topic. I’ll try.”
“This puzzle, which involves both Nabokov and Red Nine, was put together by a guy who loved literature. His office was crammed with fiction books, up, down, everywhere, with underlines and commentary on what he was reading, all of them alphabetized, all of them in good shape, which I take to mean that they were of great value to him. He knew, loved, dreamed, and breathed literature. Fiction stories, anyway. So the puzzle might reflect that, and guess who’s stupid about it? Me.”
“I doubt you’re stupid about anything, but go on.”
“My question is, do you know somebody who really knows literature? I have to find a principle to uncork the message in the bottle, and I don’t even know what the cork would be, much less the bottle. I thought if I could talk to someone who knows and loves it, maybe that person would see something I never could or would say something that might organize my thinking in a helpful way.”
She paused. “There’s a creative writing department at Johns Hopkins that’s supposed to– No, no, wait, I have another idea. There’s a nice woman in town named Susan Beckham. She’s published a series of novels that have been extremely well received. She sent me a wonderful note when Jimmy died. She doesn’t talk to the press. She doesn’t want to ‘give too much away,’ she says. She’s the only writer left in the world who doesn’t court publicity. I could call her. This is exactly the kind of intriguing question that she might like. And as I say, she’s nice.”
She was nice.
They met at three the next afternoon in a coffee shop in a utopian village in Baltimore called Cross Keys, where it was possible to forget the ugliness of the rat- and crime-infested city just beyond the fence.
She was willowy, her reddish hair shot with gray, her freckles still visible into her fifties. Well-turned-out in pantsuit and glasses and low heels, she could have been a mom, a vice president, a lawyer, a teacher.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Swagger. Miss Beckham?”
“Mr. Swagger,” she said, rising, offering a hand, “it’s nice to meet you. Jean told me you were an extraordinary man, a real hero in the old-fashioned sense.”
“She got the ‘old’ part right, anyway. All that was a million years ago. Even then I was lucky. The real heroes came back in boxes. Only us fakes came back on two legs.”
“I saw a limp as you walked in.”
“Okay, a leg and a half, then.”
That got him a smile. He sat down across from her.
“I’ve never solved a puzzle in my life,” she said, “so I don’t know how I can help you. But I’ll give it a try.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Here it is. There was an old CIA fellow whose job was making up phony biographies for agents overseas. He was good at it, because he had a creative mind and he knew a whole lot of stuff. He may have made up a name for someone, and I’m trying to find that man. Here is what I’ve found out so far.”
Swagger told her of the office full of novels, the special love of Nabokov and his puns and gamesmanship, and finally, the synesthesia that Niles and Vlad shared. “I know it’s hard to believe, but–”
“Mr. Swagger, I happen to be an expert on the tricks the mind can play on people. I believe it completely.”
“So that’s it. I’m thinking you’ll see a pattern or come up with a question I should ask, or might have an idea that–”
“Tell me what writers he had in his library.”
“Some I knew, many I didn’t. A few years back I read a lot of post-World War II novels. So I recognized
“He had refined tastes.”
“Not quite. There was also a lot of what you might call junk. Crime stuff, thrillers, that sort of thing. A couple of books by James Aptapton. Lots of paperbacks, people like Hammond Innes, Jim Thompson, Nevil Shute, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, someone called Richard S. Prather, John D. MacDonald, another Mac-Ross Macdonald- books that, from their title or their cover, seemed to be about crime or murder. It was all mixed up. He wasn’t a snob, I’m guessing. If it had a good story, he’d learn from it. All the books felt read – you know, all the spines were limber, most were marked up, he had one of those ex libris labels in each one with his name. He was a hard, serious reader of stories. Nabokov, he had every Nabokov thing, some in Russian, even. Are you getting anything?”
She sighed. “No, not really. Only this, and I don’t see how it would be any help at all. It has nothing to do with synesthesia, colors, Russian lit, Nabokov, anything.”
“Please, who knows, maybe it’s the key.”
